The present invention broadly relates to the field of contact management and more particularly relates to the field of contact frequency monitoring for contact management.
Contact management refers to the management of contacts in a computing environment. Contact managers originated as extensions to the computerized version of an address book or rolodex. Sales driven organizations adopted contact management systems decades ago to manage the sales cycle for products and services. Legacy contact management systems provided address book functionality along with forms driven information management for each contact in an address book such as role within an organization, family information and an indication of last communication with each contact along with a notes field for the nature of the relationship with the contact. Additionally, legacy contact management systems provided calendaring and scheduling functionality integrated through association with the different contacts in the address book.
Modern e-mail communications systems have adopted many of the features of legacy contact managers to provide a robust contact management environment supporting electronic communications. In this regard, the electronic communications associated with different contacts in a list of contacts such as an address book are now integrated fully with the address book so that electronic communications exchanges with contacts in the address book can be stored for future reference. In this way, end users can monitor the frequency with which end users communicate with contacts by manually scanning persisted records for e-mail communications with the contacts in the address book.
The explosion of e-mail users, however, has resulted in a corresponding expansion of the average address book for the end user. Managing hundreds if not thousands of contacts can become unwieldy. In that oftentimes contact information remains synchronized between the address book of an e-mail client or contact manager, and mobile computing devices like cellular telephones, storage space can be at a premium. A large number of contacts in an address book, then, can be problematic for many end users.
To address the growing size of an address book, end users occasionally engage in a manual pruning process. The manual pruning process involves the end user scanning the contacts in an address book to determine which contacts are current, and which have become stale. A stale contact is a contact with whom infrequent (if any) communications have transpired within a threshold period of time. For an address book of modest size, manually pruning stale contacts is not terribly challenging. However, for the typical corporate end user, managing stale contacts from an address book can be time consuming, unmanageable and, in consequence, seldom happens.